Fatherjack

If you have some spare time and want to meet me for a beer at a conference we can spend a long time talking about the bad points of Windows Phones. However there is one feature that I cannot find on Android or iOS which almost makes it worth carrying around. I have to carry […]

Nothing wholly SQL Server-related this time but this is something that I have been meaning to write for ages. While searching on the internet for content I gather loads of URLs that might be useful to me and not long after this I lose track of what content is to be found at each location. […]

I work from a laptop, both at work and at home. In both cases the laptop is either plugged in or I am running on battery power and in both cases I want to make sure that I am using an appropriate Windows power profile. When the laptop is plugged in I want High performance […]

Every good DBA and Developer keeps their code under source control. What? You don’t? Well, read this and then go and investigate it, there are plenty of options, some free, some you need to pay for. Getting that all sorted is content for another blog (or two!) so let’s get back to editing Powershell files […]

There are many occasions when, as a DBA, you want to see who is connected to your SQL Server, along with how they are connecting and what sort of activities they are carrying out. I’m going to look at a couple of ways of getting this information and compare the effort required and the results […]

It’s hard work, some find it harder than others, but there are plenty of people making an effort to write down and publish content they want to share. Why then do some of those people having gone to the effort of creating the content fall at the last hurdle when presenting it online? I have […]

Hopefully you have read the blog by William Durkin explaining why your SIMPLE databases need a log backup in some cases. There is a SQL Server bug that means in some cases databases are marked as being in SIMPLE RECOVERY but have a log wait type that shows they are not properly configured. Please read his […]

I’ve yet to have a totally smooth experience with PowerShell and it was late on Friday when I crashed into this problem. I haven’t investigated if this is a generally well understood circumstance and if it is then I apologise for repeating everything. Scenario: I wanted to scan a number of server for many properties, […]

I have spent a lot of today repeating steps that I followed months ago and it is hopefully through writing it down here that I will remember the steps needed if it happens again. I was building a VM environment on my laptop (using VMWare but that is irrelevant) and it went like: Create VM […]

In a previous version of Windows (circa Windows95 or older) there was a button in the toolbar of it’s equivalent of Windows Explorer that generated a list of files in the open directory, in a text file. Despite searching through http://toastytech.com/guis/indexwindows.html I cant locate an image of it or find a demo of it in […]